


except her grief

by elumish



Series: to relish a love-song [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Female Jason Todd, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23743849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: Jay knows the tires are a bad idea.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Series: to relish a love-song [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1799632
Comments: 29
Kudos: 320
Collections: Jason Todd Steals the Batmobile Tires





	except her grief

Jay knows the tires are a bad idea. 

They’re each about half her body weight--which is has gone down since Mom died--and she has to take them off the car and carry them away individually, and she can barely wrap her arms around them, but they’ll definitely sell for enough to get her through the next few weeks at least, and that’s too much of a temptation to pass by.

But still, they’re  _ Batman’s _ , and he punishes criminals, and so this is probably a really fucking stupid thing to do.

She’s done a lot of dumb shit, but she usually triesnot to be a Batman-level criminal.

If he hadn’t wanted anyone to steal his tires, though, he shouldn’t have made them so easy to steal.

She has the third tire almost to the alleyway when there’s a swoop above her and then a thud as something black and swoopy and  _ fucking huge _ lands in front of her, and she jerks backwards with a truly embarrassing squeak and falls on her ass.

“Those are mine,” Batman says in a deep, gravelly voice.

“Not anymore,” Jay says, to make up for the squeak.

It sounds like Batman sighs, and then he’s moving towards her like a massive black wall, and she flinches away from him, because she’s heard his gloves are reinforced with some kind of metal, and that must hurt like hell.

Batman stops, two feet away from her. It’s hard to make out body from cape, it all looks like one solid mass of black, and some distant part of her brain thinks that that must be on purpose. The rest of her brain is busy being fucking terrified.

“Where are your parents?” Batman asks.

The question hurts, a little, so it comes out angry when Jay says, “What’s it to you?” She takes the opportunity to stand up, too, even though now her back is pressed against the wall and she feels boxed in by Batman’s looming presence.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble. Just help me put the tires back on, and I’ll take you home to your parents.”

“I don’t have parents,” Jay spits out, “not that it’s any of your fucking business. So now what are you going to do?”

Batman stares at her for a while, or at least she thinks he does, even though it’s kind of hard to tell with his face behind that black mask, and all of him in the shadow of the alley. She wonders if he ever makes stupid faces behind the mask, because nobody can see them. 

“Now,” he says finally, “you’re going to help me put the tires back on my car, and then I’m going to take you someplace safe.”

“If you stick me in a group home I’m just going to run away, so there’s no point in even bothering. And they’re my tires now. I got them off your car fair and square.”

“You did get them off,” Batman says, and if he wasn’t Batman, she would say he was amused. But he is Batman, so he’s probably just planning on figuring out how to eat her. “However, it’s my vehicle, and you’ll have a hard time actually managing to take them anywhere, particularly with me trying to stop you. I’m going to get you somewhere safe and warm. Why don’t you make this a little easier for both of us and not fight me on it.”

Honestly, she knows she can’t fight him if she tried, not least of which because he’s massive and also  _ fucking Batman _ . And she can run away from wherever he tries to put her, because no way is she going back to one of those group homes. The last few were bad enough, and that was even before she was in the system as a Bad Kid.

But still, she says, “I ain’t sucking your dick for it. I’ll bite it off if you try.”

Now it’s Batman who looks like he flinches away from her, just a little, and then he swoops forward like a fluttering black wall to demand, “Did somebody try to make you do that?”

“Only every other man who sees me.” Jay grins at him. “I’m real pretty, y’see?”

“I would never ask that you do me sexual favors for helping you,” Batman says, “and if anyone ever does, you have my permission to do whatever you can to stop them. Up to and including biting off whatever they try to put in your mouth.” He gestures towards the tires. “The sooner you get those back on, the sooner I can get you some food.”

Jay considers running, but food does sound nice, and besides, she would never be able to outrun Batman. Especially because there’s a rumor that he can actually fly, and those cables that he uses are to hide the fact that he’s actually a meta. So with a sigh, she gets her arms around the tire nearest her and starts dragging it back to Batman’s car.

It’s more work to put them back on than it was to take them off, or maybe her arms are just more tired from lugging them around, but Batman helps hold stuff, and she keeps having the feeling that he’s watching her, but she can’t actually tell if he is.

She really hopes he doesn’t make her bite his dick off.

He opens the passenger side door for her once all the tires are back on, closing it again once she’s in like he wants to make sure that she actually stays there. And then he walks around to the other side and sits down in the driver’s seat. He looks over at her and says, “Put your seatbelt on.”

“Why do you have seatbelts in your bat-car anyway? This thing is a fucking tank.”

“Language,” he says.

“English,” she says back.

That actually seems to surprise him, because he just turns and looks at her for a second, and then he repeats, “Seatbelt.”

Jay pulls the backpack she’s been wearing off so she can hold it between her legs, then puts her seatbelt on. It won’t be that hard to get out of it, if she needs to.

He starts driving once she’s belted in, and the car is a lot quieter than she’d expected for how heavy she knows it is. They drive in silence for a while, and when she can’t take it anymore, she asks, “Where are you taking me?”

“For the night, I’m taking you to stay with Bruce Wayne.”

Jay laughs.

Batman doesn’t.

Jay stops laughing, so she can say, “You’re fucking with me. What is Bruce Wayne going to do with me?”

“Give you a bed to sleep in and food to eat, at least for the night, until we can figure out where to put you more permanently. He already has one so-ward, and he is a licensed emergency foster parent. He is an...ally, of sorts, and I promise that he won’t touch you.”

“Like hell is Bruce Wayne going to want a random street kid in his house. I bet his other kid is some rich brat who’s never even seen Crime Alley.”

“I’ll give you a number you can call,” Batman says, “and if he hurts you, ever, you can call and someone will come to help you. No matter who Bruce Wayne is, no matter how much money he has, this person will help you.”

Jay squints suspiciously at Batman. “What do you mean, ever? I thought this was just a one night thing.”

“He won’t turn you out if it takes more than a night to find you somewhere safe to stay.”

This all sounds too good to be true, but there are also not any rumors about Batman doing stuff like this, about Batman taking kids and hurting them, and she would have heard, because she listens for that sort of stuff, because she might not be able to do much but she’s not going to let kids littler than her get hurt by some gross old man.

Still, she has to ask, “Are you sure about this? Really sure about this? That he’ll be fine with me being in his house?”

“I’m positive.”

It still sounds wrong, but Jay figures she’ll just sneak out a window when Bruce Wayne isn’t looking. Everyone knows he’s kind of an idiot, and if she disappears, it’s not like he’s going to look for her.

Batman touches his ear and says, “A, can you let Mr. Wayne know he’s going to have a guest tonight?”

Going from context, she’s pretty sure he’s not talking to her, so he must have some sort of radio in his ear, which is mostly interesting because everything she’s ever heard says that Batman has worked alone since Robin disappeared.

They drive out of Real Gotham to the weird rich person suburban part of it, and gates open and then they pull up right in front of Bruce Fucking Wayne’s house. She knows that it’s his house because she’s seen pictures of it on tabloids in the dollar store she used to go to with her mom. There’s an old guy waiting outside, dressed up all fancy even though it’s the ass end of the night, and Batman gets out and the old guy opens Jay’s door and then steps back, and Jay clambers out clutching her backpack before either of them can pull her out.

“I’ve brought you a guest for the night,” Batman says to the old guy. “Until there’s a more permanent safe place to stay.”

“You’re not Bruce Wayne,” Jay says, because she’s not stupid and knows what Bruce Wayne looks like, and he’s definitely not this random old guy. She turns on Batman, saying, “I’m not staying with this random old guy just because he’s standing outside Bruce Wayne’s house.”

“My name is Alfred Pennyworth, and it is my responsibility to take care of Master Bruce and his home. I am sorry that he is not here to meet you, but he will be here shortly, I promise you.”

“Right,” Jay says skeptically. “Yeah, sure. Okay. Right.” She looks at Batman. “So this is it, then? You’re dropping me off here and then just, what, fucking off?”

Batman pulls out a small white card from...somewhere and hands it over to her. All that’s on it is a phone number, Gotham area code, written in pen. “I can’t stay,” he tells her, and she wants to pretend that he sounds apologetic in that deep raspy voice of hers. “But if you call this number, someone will come to help you. I promise. You’ll be safe here.”

Jay turns the card over in her hand, then says, “I don’t have a phone.”

“I assure you,” the old guy says, “we have many landline phones around the manor, and you are welcome to use any of them at any time.”

Jay’ll believe that when she sees it, but she doesn’t want to say that to the old guy, so instead she just stuffs the card in her pocket and hunches her shoulders. 

“You’ll be safe here,” Batman says again, and then he gets in his car and drives away, leaving Jay standing on Bruce Wayne’s fancy driveway with the old guy.

Who stares at her for a moment, then asks, “May I take your bag?”

“No.”

“Very well.” He gestures towards the door to the house. “Shall we go in?”

“Batman said he was putting me with Bruce Wayne, so I’m not going in until I see Bruce Wayne.” She feels a little bad about making the old guy stand outside in the dark, especially because it’s getting kind of cold out, so she adds, “You can go in if you want.”

Also, if he does go in, she’ll be able to sneak off without him being able to stop her. She can definitely scale that gate.

The old guy smiles at her and says, “I will stay out here with you, if you insist on staying out here. Can you tell me your name?”

She doesn’t really want to, because it’ll make it easier for child services to find her, but it feels kind of rude not to tell him, so she says, “Jay.”

“Thank you, Master Jay,” he says, which is very weird, because she had thought that ‘master’ was for guys. But maybe it’s just a weird rich person butler way of referring to...people. And thanking her for giving him her name is even weirder.

They stand there in silence for a while, Jay fidgeting for a bit because she’s not used to being this much in the open. Gotham doesn’t have areas this open. Maybe there’s a park somewhere that’s big, not in Crime Alley.

She probably shouldn’t sleep tonight, not that she ever slept the first couple nights of staying in a new place, and she’s definitely not going to be staying in this place long enough to be comfortable sleeping here. Bruce Wayne is probably going to stick her out of the way somewhere, but that doesn’t mean he can’t come find her at night, or this old guy can’t, or Bruce’s kid can’t.

Speaking of that. “Batman said there’s another kid here?”

The old guy looks at her, then says, “Unfortunately, Master Richard, now an adult, no longer lives with us.”

“Did Bruce Wayne, what, kick him out or something once he turned eighteen? I know most foster parents do that.”

She thinks the old guy looks sad, but he sounds as stoic as before when he says, “We would both prefer if Master Richard still resided here, but he has found his own path in Blüdhaven, and we are very proud of him.”

That sounds too good to be true, based on every experience she’s ever had with a foster parent, but maybe the old guy likes this Richard, at least. 

“Speaking of Master Richard,” the old guy continues, “I am sure we have some clothing of his that will fit you. He was taller than you, but I am sure we can find clothing that will fit well enough.

Jay isn’t taking her clothes off in this house if she can help it, other than maybe to shower with the door locked and barricaded, but she nods anyway, just so she doesn’t have to argue with him.

He smiles at her, and that’s when the door opens and Bruce Wayne steps outside. His hair looks wet, like he just showered, and he’s in sweats, and he looks very different from the pictures in the tabloids. He also looks really tired.

“Sorry,” Bruce Wayne says, and his voice sounds weirdly familiar. She can’t remember the last time she watched TV, but it must have been on somewhere that she was holed up outside of. “Didn’t you want to come in?”

Jay rolls her eyes at him. He’s definitely just as much of an idiot as she’s always heard. “I wasn’t going to follow some random guy into your house just because he said he worked for you.”

Bruce Wayne nods. “Very smart. But he does work for me, and you’re welcome to come inside. In fact, I insist.” He grins, and his teeth are super white. “It would look bad on the news if I had a kid sleeping on my driveway.”

Jay doesn’t really want to, but she follows him into his house, and the old guy follows behind, and then she’s distracted by staring at his massive fucking entryway, all dark wood and high ceilings, and it looks like something that should be from an old book by Jane Austen or someone, but someone actually  _ lives _ here.

“Are you hungry?” Bruce Wayne asks. “Or would you rather sleep first?”

She doesn’t want to admit that she’s hungry, but she’s not sure when else she’ll get a chance to eat, so she says, “Hungry.”

“I should have known,” Bruce Wayne says, but he’s smiling. “Not too long ago that I had another growing boy in here, eating me out of house and home.”

Jay laughs a little, and then she realizes Alfred is smiling but isn’t saying anything, and she thinks,  _ oh, shit, they think I’m a boy _ .

And then she thinks, I can work with this. If he wants to put her in foster care, it’ll be a lot harder for them to find her file if they think she’s a boy named Jay instead of a girl. They’ll probably look under Jason, with that, and then they definitely won’t find her, and she’ll be able to fuck off somewhere while they’re trying to figure out what to do with a Jason who hasn’t been branded a Bad Kid.

The old guy leads her down a hallway--they have actual hallways  _ inside their house _ \--and into a kitchen, which is giant and sparkling clean, and he starts pull out food like he’s about to cook her a meal right now, so she says, “I can make myself something. Or just have, you know, cereal or whatever.”

“It is no problem,” the old guy says, still pulling food out of the fridge. They have more food in their fridge than she and her mom went through in a month.

But Jay feels guilty that he’s going to make her food in the middle of the night--and, more than that, she’s afraid that anything he does for her Bruce Wayne is going to make her pay back tenfold--so she steps up towards him and says, “No, it’s okay, I can just eat whatever. Just point me to whatever is okay for me to eat.” Most of this food looks expensive, but even Bruce Wayne must have cereal or crackers or something somewhere.

The old guy stops taking things out and looks at her, and she’s afraid he’s going to decide she can’t eat anything at all because she just argued with him, but then from behind her Bruce Wayne says, “Alfred doesn’t like anyone else using his kitchen.”

“That’s because you have set fire to all manner of food,” the old guy says, and he is smiling. “Master Bruce has managed to set spaghetti on fire, as well as rice, and let’s not discuss the oatmeal incident.”

Bruce Wayne coughs. “Let’s not.”

The old guy turns his smile on Jay and says, “If you would like to help me cook, I will welcome that help, but right now it is late, and I am sure you are tired. Do you eat ham?”

Jay shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah. I mean, I eat whatever.”

“And no food allergies?”

Jay shrugs again. “Nothing has killed me yet.”

The old guy stares at her for a bit, and then he says, “I will make you a ham sandwich, then, to tide you over until morning. Please, sit down.”

Jay perches on one of the chairs, pulling her backpack onto her lap so she can hold on to it with one hand.

“And in the morning,” Bruce Wayne says, “you and I can figure out the safest place for you to be placed more permanently. How old are you?”

“Why do you care?”

“I’d like to get to know you.”

“You’re giving me to someone else tomorrow, so you don’t need to pretend you want to get to know me.” The old guy sets down a plate in front of her, and she says, “Thanks.” It’s a giant sandwich overflowing with ham and lettuce and sliced tomatoes on some sort of fancy crusty bread, and it’s more food than she’s eaten in a long time, and she has to keep herself from stuffing the whole thing in her mouth.

Instead, she says, “Thanks,” again, and takes as big a bite as she can manage, so big she can barely chew around the mass of food.

It tastes  _ so good _ . There’s some sort of mustard that has just a little bit of spiciness to it, and she hasn’t fresh vegetables in  _ forever _ , and there’s just so much flavor, and she swallows so hard it hurts her throat a little. 

“I’ll get you some water,” Mr. Pennyworth says, bustling back over and pulling out a real glass instead of a plastic cup or one of those really old mugs that they would get from wherever. He fills it with water from a jug of water he pulls out of the fridge, then sets it down in front of her.

“Thanks,” Jay says around a mouthful of sandwich. She’s already gotten through like half of it, and she’s starting to feel full, but hell if she’s not going to finish it.

“You’re welcome,” Mr. Pennyworth says, but he adds, “though it would be more polite not to speak with your mouth full.”

“You just yell at me when I speak with my mouth full,” Bruce Wayne says, sounding grumpy. 

Mr. Pennyworth shakes his head. “You’re a grown man who I’ve been telling not to speak with your mouth full for longer than this young man has been alive. You are not a teenage boy.”

“There’s no way Jay is a teenager.”

“‘m basically a teenager,” Jay says, annoyed. She knows she’s little, but she’ll be thirteen this year, and she’s not going to let him think she’s eleven or something. Her throat is dry from all of the food she’s been stuffing down it, so she takes a big gulp of water. “This is the best fucking sandwich I’ve ever had.”

“Language,” Bruce Wayne says.

Jay was just about to eat the last bite of sandwich, but she puts it down instead so she can look at Bruce Wayne and say, “You sound like Batman.”

There’s a noise like Mr. Pennyworth drops something, but when Jay looks over at him, he’s just washing the dishes. Bruce Wayne laughs, but it’s a weird laugh, like he’s trying to laugh more than like he actually is. “In what way?” he asks finally, and Jay doesn’t know why, but for the first time she’s genuinely really fucking afraid of him.

So she says, “It was just a joke,” and stuffs the rest of the sandwich in her mouth before he can take it away from her.

Bruce Wayne stares at her, and then he says, “I like to think I’m much more attractive.”

Jay watches him out of the corner of her eye as she stares down at her plate and chews her last mouthful furiously. She doesn’t want it to still be in her mouth if he hits her. 

But then the scary look in his eyes fades back to the bland cheerful look, and he says, “Well, it looks like you made the most of that sandwich. Why don’t I show you to a bedroom. Alfred, can you find some of Dick’s old clothes?”

Jay can’t help freezing at the word ‘bedroom’, because she really fucking hopes it isn’t Bruce Wayne’s bedroom, but all she asks is, “You call your son a dick?”

“Dick is a nickname for Richard,” Bruce tells her.

That sounds suspect, but Jay’s not going to get in the middle of Bruce Wayne’s relationship with his kid who he apparently goes around calling a dick. None of it is her problem. She just needs to get through the night and then she’ll be back on her own again.

Trailing after Bruce Wayne through his many hallways gives her a chance to spot windows and also things that she could probably pawn. The problem is that the stuff is  _ too _ expensive, that if she took it people wouldn’t be willing to sell it because it’s too recognizable.

There is some silver that she could hock, because stuff like that can be melted down. 

The room he leads her to is actually fucking massive, basically the size of their entire apartment back when she was living with her mom, and the bed is huge and covered in a comfortor that looks  _ so thick _ , and there are about a million pillows, and she’s pretty sure he brought her to his bedroom and she’s going to have to bite off Bruce Wayne’s dick.

But then he says, “I’ll leave you here for the night. Alfred will deliver you some clothing to change into, and he can wash what you’re wearing in the morning so you have clean clothing to wear. My room is at the end of the hallway, and you can get me if you need anything. Feel free to get up whenever you want in the morning.” He grins, showing all of his very white teeth. “I’m not a morning person.”

Maybe that’ll give Jay a chance to grab some food and be out before Bruce Wayne is up.

Bruce Wayne reaches out, and Jay ducks away, clutching onto the strap of her backpack. She doesn’t want him touching her. She doesn’t want any man touching her.

His hand freezes, hanging midair, and then he pulls it back. He doesn’t hit her. Instead, he says, “Sleep well. I’ll see you in the morning.”

He shuts the door behind him, and Jay goes to grab the chair to block the door, but then she remembers that Mr. Pennyworth is apparently going to bring her some clothes. She doesn’t trust him, either, but he seems nice enough, and he’s old.

She stands awkwardly in the middle of the room until there’s a knock, and then she opens the door just enough to see Mr. Pennyworth standing there in the hallway, holding a stack of clothing. He holds it out to her, saying, “Hopefully, these will fit well enough for the night. Please let me know if you need anything else.”

Jay takes the clothes, then shuts the door. 

She’s not going to put it on, but it can’t hurt to have an extra set of clothing, so she rolls them up and jams them in her backpack, rearranging it so the new clothes are at the bottom. There are two different doors in the room, and she opens both of them to make sure that neither leads to a joining room. 

One of the doors leads to a giant walk-in closet, and the other to a bathroom that’s all white tile and a giant bathtub. She would fucking kill someone to take a hot shower, so she barricades the bedroom door with a chair and then heads into the bathroom with her backpack, closing the door behind her. There’re a lock on it, but it takes a key, and she has no idea where that might be, so she just hopes that the chair jammed under the other doorknob will hold.

She strips off her clothes, putting them all in a pile on the counter. She considers showering with her underpants on, but she doesn’t want them to get wet, so she puts them on the counter too, jammed under the rest of her clothes. She doesn’t want one of them to see her underpants if they get in here.

She used to have a bra, one of those training bras, but it started to fall apart, and then she lost so much weight it wasn’t doing anything anyway.

She turns the shower on as hot as it’ll go, then waits until the room is filled with steam before getting in. It’s  _ really hot _ , so hard it hurts and itches, but she’s never going to get a shower this hot again, probably, so she stands under it and grabs the soap and starts scrubbing everywhere.

The water turns gross and brown and grey on the floor of the tub, but she just keeps scrubbing until it stops being so brown, and then she grabs shampoo and shampoos her hair, and that’s gross and brown again, and she has to keep wiping her eyes to keep the shampoo out of them, and that’s why she doesn’t immediately realize that she’s crying.

But she’s not going to let a little crying get in the way of getting clean, so she finishes washing her hair and then grabs conditioner--real actual conditioner, not the two-in-one stuff that they used to buy when they could afford it, when her mom had an actual job.

It takes forever to work through her hair, and she has to take more conditioner, but she figures a rich guy like Bruce Wayne won’t notice, at least not until she’s long gone. A whole bunch of hair comes out as she works her hands through it, all clumpy, but by the end she can actually run her hands through her hair for the first time in forever.

She wants to keep standing here, but she figures it won’t be too long before they decide her shower is too long, so, reluctantly, she gets out.

Her clothes are stiff and gross, but they’re  _ her _ clothes, so she puts them back on, even her jeans.

Sleeping on the bed will make it too easy for them to find her, so she grabs the comforter off of the top and one of the pillows and drags both of them into the closet, one at a time. There are still more pillows, so she grabs another one, and she puts one behind her and another against the wall on another side so she can lean against it, and she wraps the comforter around her and pulls the door closed.

It’s going to be a long night.

**Author's Note:**

> Should I have been working on other stuff? Yes.  
> Have I been working on other stuff? No.
> 
> Have this instead. Hopefully there will be more of this eventually, and also I will update my real stories soon-ish.
> 
> I hope you're all doing well and keeping as safe as you can. This is a weird time.


End file.
